Silent but deadly: a review of "Samson & Delilah"

Ironically, since European colonisation, there has been a deafening silence of Indigenous representation in all forms and at all societal levels. As Stanner asserts, Indigenous people have been written out of history (1967, p. 22), but the disappearance of our First Nations people is not limited to just the encyclopaedias. Australians have long been viewing media and cinema through a white lens, largely representing an Anglo society, and by its binary, neglecting the Indigenous society that – while subjugated to a near nothingness – remains poignant to this nation’s existence. Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton challenges this white lens in Samson & Delilah (2009), in what has been hailed as Australia’s ‘most important film’ (Redwood 2009, p. 27). Thornton’s film encapsulates the post-colonial state of Indigenous society through a perspective that is rarely shown, but is necessary for the nation and, more generally, the world, to understand the ways in which the First Nations people are subordinated on their own land.

Limits in complexity: the contextual boundaries of Peter Carstairs’ "September"

Peter Carstairs’ 2007 film September is a quiet, intimate contemplation of friendship, coming of age, and ‘the subtle side of racism’ in 1968 Australia (Carstairs in Robertson 2007, p. 16). In the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, Ed Anderson (Xavier Samuel) the son of a wool and wheat farmer, and Paddy Parker (Clearance John Ryan) the son of an Aboriginal labourer on the Andersons’ property, navigate the strains placed on their relationship by complex long-standing prejudices and the changing nature of the Australian political world.

The Australian National Maritime Museum’s view from the ship and view from the shore

Next year, the Australian National Maritime Museum’s replica of Captain Cook’s ship, HMS Endeavour, will circumnavigate Australia to commemorate 250 years of Cook landing on Australian shores. I was excited to visit the museum to hear their rationale behind this – something that I have heard very mixed responses to, and which I myself thought sounded inconsiderate (and ignorant) of Australia’s Indigenous history prior to my visit.

White Australia has a Blackie Blackie Brown history

The gatekeepers for institutions of fine arts, classical music and theatre in Australia are traditionally white, upper middle-class people. Nakkiah Lui’s existence and success as an Indigenous playwright is a radical disturbance in this bubble of society as, by nature, stories and storytellers that challenge cultural hegemony will always be political, and Blak artists entering theatre demonstrate a fusion and adaptation of Indigenous oral traditions into Australia’s highbrow society. Aboriginal playwrights and performances have a complex history in terms of audience reception as they often deal with difficult and confronting topics that ‘regular’ theatre audiences may not engage with (Grehan 2010). Not only do they have the burden of representing ‘all’ Aboriginal people, but the stories they share are often those whose voices were historically silenced, erased or dismissed (Morris 1992).

First Footprints

History should be written to inform the present and honour the past. In order to successfully meet this criteria history needs to be retold, above all else, truthfully. This truthfulness requires a brazen acknowledgement of past actions and events no matter how they reflect on the nation. In the case of Australian history, and any other colonizing nation, that truth contains harmful realities of oppression. Because of this, history is often reconstructed in a form that is easier to swallow or in a way that benefits those leading the nation. Because records are largely made by white people, they have far too often become subjective retellings of history used to justify actions made by white administrators and political leaders of the past and present.

Speculating reality: a review of Claire Coleman’s "Terra Nullius"

Fiction has the power to show the reality of people’s experiences and spark emotion in those who read it. Speculative fiction especially has been used to observe our political and cultural climate and project an image of what is possible, even probable, through speculating about worlds that are unlike our own reality. My shelf is filled with speculative dystopian novels; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring surveillance and censorship in an authoritarian State, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, studying conservative approaches that tyrannize women. Terra Nullius, written by Wirlomin Noongar woman, Claire Coleman, sits beside these classics in its own right, detailing the dystopia generated by colonialism in Australia.

"Jasper Jones" as a Window into Australia’s Aboriginal history

Jasper Jones (2017) is an Australian film adaptation of Craig Silvey’s 2009 novel of the same name. The film is directed by Arrernte woman Rachel Perkins, who founded Blackfella Films in 1992 and has since been heading the initiative to include more Indigenous representation on screen. With an Aboriginal character, Jasper Jones, at the forefront of the story, the film presents a window into the lives of Aboriginal people living in 1960’s white Australia.

"Sweet Country"'s powerful depiction of racial dynamics and tensions of the 1920s

Warwick Thornton’s outback western, Sweet Country (2017) is a powerful depiction of the racial dynamic and tensions of the 1920’s. The plot follows the story of Sam Kelly, an Indigenous man, who shoots and kills a white man Harry March in self-defence. The themes of colonialism, law and power cultivate in the experiences of the Aboriginal and white characters alike. The stories of Aboriginal people from this era are still largely untold, and even a fictional representation of this history, such as Sweet Country, helps the histories of black Australia penetrate the mainstream.

A.B. Original’s "Reclaim Australia" is ensuring Australians can no longer say “I just didn’t know” about Aboriginal issues

Reclaim Australia is the debut album of hip hop duo A.B. Original that surged the voices and issues of Aboriginal Australia onto the airwaves and into the minds of the public. Fronted by Yorta Yorta man, Briggs (aka Adam Briggs) and Ngarrindjeri man, Trials (aka Daniel Rankine), A.B. Original stands for Always Black Original and their 12-track album released late in 2016 geared up political talks for the upcoming controversies of January 26th, known as Australia Day by some and as Invasion or Survival Day by others.

Waraburra Nura

My visit to the UTS’s Indigenous Art Collection and the Waraburra Nura (the Happy Wanderers place) Indigenous garden afforded me the opportunity to re-engage once again with the knowledge that my white privilege has a black history. As a member of the Munnungali clan and Yugambeh Nation-Language people who reside in the Bouedesert area of the Gold Coast Hinterland, I am already deeply connected and sensitive to issues of Colonial representations of history, the role of Indigenism in contesting Western knowledge orthodoxies, the importance of pushing back against the reproduction of the colonised as fixed identities and why under-theorizing the deprived and disadvantaged Australian Indigenous human condition, allows it to proliferate. As a whole, Jennifer Newman’s and Alice McAuliffe’s talk and the artwork on display reflected Indigenous survival, resilience and thriving. It also reflected the relationship between art and politics, not only because it represented both Western and Indigenous political ideology, through an account of political events of historical moments in time, but also because it illustrated how the artist themselves (since their art production is a commitment to a political stance) belong to the political realm.